The 5 Biggest Dick Moves in Online Gaming History (Part 5)

#2. Kiting Lord Kazzak (World of Warcraft)

World of Warcraft's smartest move was dividing the world into two competing factions, because people will fund the most appallingly self-destructive bullshit if they think they're defeating a bipartisan enemy

Ablestock.com/AbleStock.com/Getty ImagesI wonder what this picture is doing here?
"THE REAL QUESTION IS REPEALING MEDICAL CARE!"

As with any protracted war you have the foot soldiers, and the geniuses working out how to use natural resources to destroy their enemies more effectively. And in the World of Warcraft, natural resources are giant demons instead of iron ore.

Blizzard"I don't think I can smelt that."

Lord Kazzak was located in The Tainted Scar, winner of the Fantasy Kingdom's "Most Disturbingly Unintentional Euphemism" Award, and as you'd expect, going in without sufficient protection would hurt. This was located on the Blasted Plains, because Blizzard were experimenting with giving the players encounters that didn't mean grinding through a dungeon first. Players reacted to this offering the same way Hannibal Lecter reacted to being offered a pen: escape and slaughter.

Players lured the Lord of the Doomguard like a cat by using themselves as pieces of string, drawing him to the Alliance capital. Kazzak was designed to be a short encounter with a time limit that meant you either defeated him quickly or died. After three minutes he would enter "supreme" mode, where he became effectively unkillable. And the trip to Stormwind is longer than three minutes. So he descended on the city like a Death Star with a manhole cover welded over the exhaust port.

He stomped around the greatest concentration of Alliance players in the world firing volleys of Shadowbolts, murderous Omega beams made of screaming shadow skulls with eyes to find what they're killing. He hit that city like he was looking for the assholes who hurt his pet, Godzilla. He was only put down when a Game Master character arrived, because GMs aren't so much "Gandalf the White" as "Gandalf the Gamma Ray Laser," and a later update moved him further away from the city. And you're a spectacular dick when the Burning Legion warlock Doom Lords have to be rehomed to avoid your abuse.

#1. Monumental Assholery (EVE)

One day I'll write an article where the evilest application of technology isn't in EVE Online. That day will be in 2047, with the return the Event Horizon. CCP Productions recently erected a real world monument to their player base, a stone and steel sculpture engraved with the names of every active player as of March 1, 2014, along with a tribute to dead players of the past. We like this idea of only letting video games escape into the real world as inanimate rocks incapable of hunting us down and killing us. It doubles as rock-solid proof that there's no such thing as ghosts, because every cenotaph in the world wasn't propelled into orbit by the spirits of the angry dead to merge and meteorite Reykjavik into a crater.

It's an amazing effort to recognize the importance of their players, a touching tribute to their community, and it wasn't even a week before some assholes ruined it. And it only took that long because pudgy flesh travels slower than electronic impulses. If we redefined oxygen molecules as "nice things," these bastards would suffocate. They found the only physical expression of achievement or beauty from their entire virtual world, and then theny tweeted about vandalizing it.

Their target, "Xenuria," does seem to have been banned by more corporations than nerve gas, and is about as popular with many people, but their bullshit is on another level. These are people who cared so much that they traveled to find the most important monument of their lives, made an effort, and were then exiled from the heavenly world that they loved so much. These scumbags reversed the polarity of pilgrimage. They were permanently banned, with three people and seven accounts suspended, which means the developers got to virtually exile all of these herostratic scum at least twice over. Now we just need to invent jump drives so we can exile these assholes from our world as well. Hey, we know space is full of chest-bursting, salt-draining horrors. Might as well use the right people to find them.

Brandywine productionsAnd only in space might we find things even dickier.